Music Aesthetics - Science topic

hello

here are the publications :

I think silence is an intrinsic part of Eastern philosophy, which John Cage made used with great effect in 4'33''. To me, his not playing for that duration actually created an intensification of expectations that helped focused the attention of the audience like a laser beam. The video link shows how the audience squirmed in their seats while they waited.  It sort of reminds me of Beethoven's use of contrasting dynamics to convert his audience into active listeners.

It's taken me a while to get around to penning this, so apologies. It's a fascinating question. I think that Dave Wall makes some really great points on this above. If I understand the question correctly, you're really asking about how to consider improvised music as an entity from an ontological perspective. Why it's a good question is because I think that an awful lot of work on the ontology of music that has been published, up until really recently, simply cannot account for the possibility of an answer to this question because of the presuppositions that they pose in their account of the ontology of music. Similarly, for instance, an awful lot of work in the philosophy of music cannot admit, for instance, drone music within the category of music because of the ontological claims made about what can or cannot count as music. This proposition, as I see it, is patently absurd, entirely culturally conditioned and the result of a subjective position which is therefore entirely removed from ontological considerations. I would follow Dave in suggesting that to think about the ontology of music you have to start from the point of a view of a relational ontology and to then start to map out some of the other ontological conditions that will delimit the kinds of relations that will bring about something that we will call music, and I'd again follow Dave in saying that an intentional act that produces sound is here crucial. I'd add others though, and indeed this is what I've done in a recent book, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise, in which I sugest the following ontological taxonomy of music, and this could of course apply to improvised music also:

(i) Music is sound that is

ii) structured,

iii) eminently expressive since its only form is its expressed content, and hence

iv) irreducible to a secondary function (such as representation),

v) conditioned by an assemblage in the real world (and therefore not transcendent or ahistorical)

In case you're interested in reading more, there's info on the book here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239152113_Noise_Matters_Towards_an_Ontology_of_Noise

Thanks for reading and I hope that this contributes something useful to the debate.